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Canonical's Working On A Unity 2D Desktop

Phoronix: Canonical's Working On A Unity 2D Desktop

Back in October there was the very controversial news that Canonical would be replacing the GNOME Shell with their own Unity project as the default desktop shell for Ubuntu 11.04 and going forward. The original version and specification for Ubuntu Unity (and as found in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook) required 3D acceleration and would use Compiz as its compositing window manager. For those without the necessary graphics drivers to support the functionality, Canonical's plan for Ubuntu was to have it fall-back to the traditional GNOME desktop and inform the user of their sad graphics support. However, now Canonical's developing a 2D version of Unity for such scenarios...

Maybe by 11.10 Unity-Qt will become the sole Unity implementation. It certainly makes no sense to maintain a Clutter version and a Qt version considering that Qt alone is also capable of the very same 3D features found in Clutter.

I am also wondering if the Compiz rewrite was the right decision. Gnome Shell uses Mutter/Clutter etc. and I tried a recent build and performance was great, so the issues they had last year seem to be fixed anyway.

Qt/QML rocks anyway. Unity is a kinda mess right now and they really need to work on it hard over the next 3-4 month or they will be in trouble, because Ubuntu 11.04 sticks to GNOME 2 and doesn't offer a lot of other changes.

Anyway I hope rather sooner than later Canonical will take the bull by the horns and start working on improving the open-source graphics drivers rather than dancing around the problem by creating workarounds or fail-safe back-ends. Had it hired 2 years ago say 2/2/2 (thus 6) full-time devs on working on open-source drivers for amd/nvidia/intel respectively - they wouldn't have to bother creating a 2D backend now, besides, nowadays relatively powerful graphics cards are present even on ARM hardware so the 2D backend will die in a few years anyway (when proper drivers are present) while the qualitative open-source graphics drivers will last for a long time and will benefit a lot more projects than just Unity and will be a serious argument that Canonincal doesn't do only what benefits it directly from (not to open this debate/flame, but you know there are certain companies claiming so).

IDGI

I tried getting along with Unity but it didn't work out. Two friends of mine and I have yet to find out how to even configure that thing. The most ridiculous thing is the panel on the left part of the screen. I couldn't figure out how to move it to another place or better yet make it autohide.

Maybe by 11.10 Unity-Qt will become the sole Unity implementation. It certainly makes no sense to maintain a Clutter version and a Qt version considering that Qt alone is also capable of the very same 3D features found in Clutter.

Anyway I hope rather sooner than later Canonical will take the bull by the horns and start working on improving the open-source graphics drivers rather than dancing around the problem by creating workarounds or fail-safe back-ends. Had it hired 2 years ago say 2/2/2 (thus 6) full-time devs on working on open-source drivers for amd/nvidia/intel respectively - they wouldn't have to bother creating a 2D backend now, besides, nowadays relatively powerful graphics cards are present even on ARM hardware so the 2D backend will die in a few years anyway (when proper drivers are present) while the qualitative open-source graphics drivers will last for a long time and will benefit a lot more projects than just Unity and will be a serious argument that Canonincal doesn't do only what benefits it directly from (not to open this debate/flame, but you know there are certain companies claiming so).

That would still leave Poulsbo/Via/S3/etc users SOL. A 2d backend makes more sense here.

Maybe by 11.10 Unity-Qt will become the sole Unity implementation. It certainly makes no sense to maintain a Clutter version and a Qt version considering that Qt alone is also capable of the very same 3D features found in Clutter.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a terribly confusing name, given that Unity is also the name of a popular game dev platform (if you're on Windows or Mac for now)? Why was this sort of name collision allowed to happen?